Although history records that the British nineteenth century was obsessed with order, conventionality, and conformity, this study highlights myriad Victorians from all walks of life, across lines of class, race, and gender, who resisted social mores and sometimes the laws themselves, in a variety of ways and to varying degrees.

Brenda Ayres, now retired from full-time residential teaching, currently teaches online in the graduate program for English Literature for Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. She has edited and authored chapters in The Palgrave Handbook of Neo-Victorianism (2024), The Routledge Handbook of Victorian Scandals in Literature and Culture (2023), Neo-Victorian Things (2022), Neo-Disneyism: Inclusivity in the Twenty-First Century of Disney's Magic Kingdom (2022), The Theological Dickens (Routledge, 2022), Neo-Victorian Madness: Rediagnosing Nineteenth-Century Mental Illness in Literature and Other Media (2020); Neo-Gothic Narratives: Illusory Allusions from the Past (2020); Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture (Routledge, 2019); and Reinventing Marie Corelli for the Twenty- first Century (2019). Most recently she has written and published Wollstonecraft and Religion (2024), and Becoming Wollstonecraft: The Interconnection of Her Life and Works (Routledge, 2024). Many of her other works are listed at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=brenda+ayres&i=stripbooks&ref=nb_sb_noss_2

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Contributors

Acknowledgments

Introduction: What Is a Victorian Rebel?

Brenda Ayres and Catherine Layton

Part I: A Rebel with a Pen

1 Oscar Wilde's Velvet Rebellion

Nick Freeman

2 George Egerton's Marriage Questions: Henry Peter Higginson "of unsavory memory" and Egerton Clairmonte, Imperial Vagabond

Gail Savage

3 The Morphology of Rebellions: Critiquing Colonial Alterity, Subversive Subalternity, and Dangerous Desires During the Great India Revolt in On the Face of the Waters

4 Works of Quiet Rebels: The Unconventional Brontë Sisters

Catherine Golden

5 Florence Marryat's Rebel Spiritualism

S. Brooke Cameron and Rachel Friars

6 Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Rebellion against "Monkeyhood": The Contest Between the "Determinate Counsel" and the Evolution Theories of Robert Chambers

Lauren Nicole Cameron

7 The Covert Rebels: The Curious Case of the Two Country-Born Anglo-Indians, Kipling and Kim

Sujata (Susie) Chattopadhyay

8 "Fierce as a Dragon": New Zealand's Rebellious Mary Taylor

Emily Dotson

9 Folly to Suppose It: Grace Aguilar's Talmudic Apologia

Lindsay Katzir

Part II: A Rebel with a Cause

10 Lord Alfred Douglas: "Two Loves" and Two Rebellions

Aaron Eames

11 Rebellious Crank or Cranky Rebel? Caroline Giacometti Prodgers and Married Women's Property, 1860¿1890

Ginger Frost

12 Rebel and Reactionary: The Case of Millicent Garrett Fawcett

Julie Donovan

13 From Helston to Benares: Katie Johns' Journey to Theosophy

Julie Courtney

14 Free of Stays: Lady Florence Dixie and the Woman Question

Catherine Layton

15 Victorian Suicide: The Ultimate Act of Rebellion

Brenda Ayres

Part III: Rebels in Movement(s)

16 Bohemians and Bohemianism: Rebelling Against Mrs. Grundy

Catherine Layton

17 The Pre-Raphaelite Rebellion

Anne Anderson

18 Cranks and Crankdoms: Arts and Crafts Rebels and Rural Utopias

Anne Anderson

19 Topsy-Turvy Gilbert and Sullivan

Scott Hayes

20 Old Boy Uprisings: Rebellion and Reform at Victorian Public Schools

Daniel Stuart

21 Creating Work Opportunities for Women: The Tortoise of Polite Rebellion

Catherine Layton

22 Ishan Chandra Rai and the Pabna Peasant Uprising

Marshall Needleman Armintor

23 Enfranchising the Uitlanders: The Second Boer War and "Good Citizenship" in Chesterton and Baden-Powell

Clay Cogswell

24 Victorian Ghosts: Too Rebellious to Stay Dead

Brenda Ayres

25 Pickling the Past: Neo-Victorian Rebellion Against Victorian Morality

Brenda Ayres

Index